May 30, 2014

X-Men movies exemplify the dominant Minority Supremacist ideology of our age. Mutant superheroes are oppressed by the boring normals, except for the few enlightened members of the uncool majority. Not surprisingly, Bryan Singer's X-Men movies are vastly popular with the teenage masses, who of course are all members of a talented minority, right? I mean, if you can't trust Bryan Singer, boys, who can you trust?

The latest X-Men comic book movie Days of Future Past is a time travel flick set in 1973, much like 2011's pretty good X-Men: First Class was set in in 1962. And I liked X-Men: First Class quite a bit because it was a reboot after Brett Ratner had trashed the continuity in 2006's X-Men: Last Stand, so it stood alone better than most. This new one devotes a lot of effort to patching over problems in the continuity, so it puts the franchise back in good shape, although it may not make for the most scintillating stand-alone flick. And whenever it runs into a problem it just throws some more movie stars at it, such as Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen, which is not the worst strategy.

X-Men movies wouldn't have worked well as a franchise before the Web era since you really need to look up online before you go what all happened in the last movie and who all the teeming mutant freaks are again. I'm not really into doing my homework before a movie so I enjoyed the first one back in 2000 the most.

Also, I, personally, I find 1962 cooler than 1973. And the previous film let Michael Fassbender as the vengeful Magneto, a mutant supremacist, hog tie and stomp James McAvoy as the nice Dr. Charles Xavier.

In this one, McAvoy gets more emphasis and he's somewhat cooler -- he's supposed to resemble a 1973 British rock star fighting his heroin addiction in his country estate -- than in First Class. Unfortunately, Fassbender, who may be the top male star to emerge in this decade (although Andrew Garfield is terrific in the otherwise pointless Spider-Man reboot), doesn't get much to do other than to wave his hands around, although at the end he gets to deliver a rousing speech to Richard Nixon on the necessity of Mutant Supremacism.

I am not quite sure when in the comic mythos Magneto was rebooted as a traumatized Holocaust survivor, but this has always struck me as absurd. It obviously amplifies and extends Marvel's foundational obsession with the exaltation of troubled social outcasts of all kinds, but still absurd.

The Mutants are not the Jews of Europe. They ARE the Master Race in embryo. And if they existed, would pose an obvious threat to humanity. Just as Magneto says they do.

It seems to me the main source of tension in the entire saga- Magneto is a Holocaust survivor and both he and the authors are at pains to paint mutants as avatars for everything from European Jews to American blacks to troubled 60s teen rebels, but the authors also give Magneto lines and mannerisms and behaviours clearly demonstrating that he knows what they really are, and what he could make of them.

It's that it's trans-European, effectively linking Europe with the Middle East and Africa. To be a member of the EU, nations have to sign onto very liberal immigration policies and refugee policies. So, even non-EU nations can pour into Europe and move around in huge numbers and EU nations have to provide them with everything.

If EU were only about Europe, it might worked. Alas, it's about forcing all of Europe to open its borders wide to non-Europe. And that's deadly.

I know it's a silly movie based on a comic book and all that, but the notion of genetic mutations allowing a person to fly, read minds or teleport is just so far beyond even the outer reaches of believable that the whole thing feels stupid and pointless to me. Superhero movies about beings from other worlds/dimensions I find less jarring.

They say his problem was that he hated women. It seems the problem stemmed from loving them too much.

Too much love idealized women into perfect ladies who would appreciate a 'perfect gentleman' like himself. His hatred was not so much against women perse as over the fact that they didn't return his love. He was willing to give them all the love in the world but they weren't willing to give any back.No truth to 'All You Need Is Love'.

Lesson. Don't love too much what don't love you back. But I guess beauty is intoxicating to some.

If the normals did not exist, the specials would not be very special. So the specials had better make it part of their thing to support normality. It's hard for a crazy diamond to shine without a foil.

The movie was pretty good for movies of its type but the sudden suspension of the constitution and due process to empower an army of giant flying death robots to hunt down American citizens in response to a vaguely defined potential threat was kind of hard to swallow.

The Marvel-relevant minority is psychological and neurological (sensitive/obsessive nerds), not ethnic or racial. Plato was a "minority supremacist" -- the relevant minority in that case being the philosophers. The Romantics were also "minority supremacists" -- the minority in that case being the prophetic visionaries. Xenosystems-type Dark Enlightenment technophiles are obviously "minority supremacists" of another sort, while good-old-boy jocks are "minority supremacists" of yet another. -- Zort

I haven't seen the X-Men movies, but, most teens (probably younger) can feel like a mutant - you've got new, adult self-consciousness, you have a tendency toward self-pity for a while, you don't know who you are / where you fit in - I've read that it's common for new teens to write sci-fi stories about persecuted monsters eg. And if you have super powers, well that's your feeling of specialness, or just compensatory fantasy. It's not necessarily about being a minority; or you might say that every teen for a while feels like a minority of one.

"Maybe I've gone over fully to the Dark Side, but I though the movie made a good case for exterminating the mutants."

Yikes. I don't want to exterminate the mutants, but over at the TV Tropes website there is a trope called "Jerkass Has a Point".In one of the first trilogy movies this Senator or Vice President is calling for a Mutant Registration Act or something and says, "There has been a mutant identified who can walk through walls. What if he wants to walk through a bank vault?"

You don't want to be a jerk denying mutants civil liberties, but at the same time, wouldn't you want to keep an eye on some of these people?

Anyway, I want to see Days of Future Past, thanks for not throwing in too many spoilers Steve.

"I'm not really into doing my homework before a movie so I enjoyed the first one back in 2000 the most."

Ditto. Also LOTR. Everyone said 2 and 3 were better than 1, which I liked a lot, but the snippets of them I saw on TV struck me as overblown. I saw 1, enjoyed it and was done. Hobbit was okay but I won't bother with Hobbit 2, 3, 4. The only line of sequels that got better IMO were the Star Wars prequels, because Ep 3 > Ep 1. But watching sequels is too often like work. Or else it's like pigging out on a tasty snack until you're sick of it. One is enough, for goodness sake! If homework is required to watch a movie, then there must be a failure of storytelling somewhere. Aristotle preferred a beginning, a middle, and an end in one neat package examining no more than a 24-hour period, and the older I get, the more I think he was on to something.

In one of the first trilogy movies this Senator or Vice President is calling for a Mutant Registration Act or something and says, "There has been a mutant identified who can walk through walls. What if he wants to walk through a bank vault?"

Sometime in middle school there was a student who was at least 2 years older, a foot taller, and 100 pounds heavier than his grademates. How did the rulers of that school protect other students from him? By making him the class president, football team quarterback, scout troop leader, grand pooh-bah, etc.

How would X-Men-ish mutants fair in the real world, in real America? In the bad old elitist robber-baron days before 1930, the ruling elites would love mutants, and adopt them as their own children, and spoil them. After WWII and during the Great Compression? Mutants would be rounded up in concentration camps and killing fields, ironically for being potential "Nazis".

The '50s weren't that bad, were they? Then again, when you consider all the sci-fi horror memes of the period, people were awfully afraid of anything sciency and strange, unlike in the days of "Buck" Rogers and John Carter.

Interestingly, the original "Buck" Rogers novel which came out in the 1920s apparently was "racist" against the Chinese. My 1970s edition carries a note explaining that the novel has been revised to remove any implication that any Chinese could be bad, or be an enemy of America for tribal reasons. In the body of the novel, a clumsily added passage near the end lays the blame for their actions on extraterrestrial miscegenation, and even refers to strange skeletons (bone anthropology). Apparently nobody batted an eye at human supremacism in those bell-bottomed Gouldian days.

"I am not quite sure when in the comic mythos Magneto was rebooted as a traumatized Holocaust survivor, but this has always struck me as absurd. It obviously amplifies and extends Marvel's foundational obsession with the exaltation of troubled social outcasts of all kinds, but still absurd."

You can blame Chris Claremont for the "Magneto-as-Holocaust-survivor " stuff. It started, if memory serves, in X-MEN 150, with Magneto speechifying about his family being wiped out. And it reached its apotheosis in MAGNETO:TESTAMENT, which described ,in great detail, his childhood in Nazi Germany and his experiences in Auschwitz as a Sonderkommando.

I thought the characterization of the Paris Peace Accords were a good reflection of completely leftists have taken over control of America's historical narrative to suit their own ends. They depicted it as America surrendering to North Vietnam. That didn't happen until two years later, when Democrats in Congress cut off the South.

Right. And there were no cheering crowds or big celebrations at the Paris Peace Accord signing in late January 1973. Everybody involved was exhausted and nervous and resentful, so they got it over and done with. And certainly, no crowds of random Parisians cared enough about it to show up and cheer.

Movies are good at getting what things in the past looked like, but they are poor at getting the political mood of the past right.

Of course, the whole thing about mutants being an allegory for Black Civil Rights in the '60s is absurd. No one viewed Blacks as potential rivals (barring track and field). The more apt metaphor was always Ashkenazi Jewry, a truly superior group*. Blacks were kept out of the Ivy League because they were seen as inferior; Jews had their numbers kept artificially low because they were feared.

* John W. Campbell once tried to compliment Isaac Asimov by telling him that he always viewed Jews as a super race.

Anonymous:"I thought the characterization of the Paris Peace Accords were a good reflection of completely leftists have taken over control of America's historical narrative to suit their own ends. They depicted it as America surrendering to North Vietnam. That didn't happen until two years later, when Democrats in Congress cut off the South."

Grounds for a good counterfactual: "What if Congress hadn't cut off aid to South Vietnam?"There are solid reasons for thinking that South Vietnam might have stayed independent.

I almost asked Kissinger in 1978 about whether he would have restarted bombing of North Vietnam in 1975 if not for the Democratic Congress, but it seemed like a complicated question to ask in front of 3000 people, so at the last second I switched to the simple softball question "What do you think of Eurocommunism?" (a big deal at the time). He slugged it out of the park with a witty answer.

All movies are made for 14 year olds. Some are made for smart 14 year olds, while others are made for dumb 14 year olds.

All American movies are now, like someone said a long time ago, children's movies. I finally got around to watching Michael Haneke's Amour last night and I couldn't help contrasting it with Alexander Payne's Nebraska, which manages to be both pretentious and juvenile--no mean feat.

This perfectly captures my political ideology. I tell my liberal friends that I'm a Kennedy Democrat, when wanting to avoid a debate: anticommunist, pro-life, low tax, low immigration, no culture wars, no foreign wars. LBJ inflicted a disaster on the country, and we'll probably never recover. I think of 1965 as the apogee of America, then that year brought Vietnam, Immigration law....etc.

The Mutants are not the Jews of Europe. They ARE the Master Race in embryo. And if they existed, would pose an obvious threat to humanity.

What if the Jews of Europe were The Mutants, the Master Race in embryo? The perception of Jews and Jewish history has always been a bit schizo -- history's greatest victims, but also history's greatest survivors, achievers, schemers. Is it so unthinkable that both perceptions are true?

Dennis Dale:"All American movies are now, like someone said a long time ago, children's movies. I finally got around to watching Michael Haneke's Amour last night and I couldn't help contrasting it with Alexander Payne's Nebraska, which manages to be both pretentious and juvenile--no mean feat."

AMOUR was a jumped-up LIFETIME TV movie. Emotional pornography for 40 year old women.

Having just watched the movie, all I can say is: 1) wow everyone has gotten old; and 2) wow Jennifer Lawrence looks good when she's naked and painted blue; and 3) wow Hugh Jackman needs to lay off the steroids. Otherwise it was poorly written, poorly paced. Let's hope it was the last X-Men movie.

The movie was fun, but to me the stupid thing is why do all the mutants have awesome superpowers?

How come none of them have stupid shit like fingernails that change color from time to time, or really small urethra that force them to take eight minutes to pee, or the inability to digest apple peel, etc etc?

Steve, the X-Men movies did far less than the Iron Man movies, Captain America, Thor movies, much less the Avengers. X-Men: First Class sold $146 million worth of tickets, it probably did not even earn back in theatrical its filming cost (given that movie studios share 25% with theaters during the first week end and 50% thereafter). Meanwhile the Avengers sold $623 million and Captain America: Winter Soldier sold $254 million (and counting). Considering that the real money is in merchandise, and the Marvel Avengers/Cap/Thor/Iron Man/Hulk group is far more valuable, because teen boys and younger/older will shell out hard cash (or their parents) ... the minoritarian viewpoint finds few sellers.

What sells and makes money is stories of heroism, loyalty, courage, adventure. Not teen/gay-metaphor angst.

Which is more likely to appeal to young men and boys from Podunk to Poland, from Bangor to Beijing? Captain America and Thor and Iron Man, heroes all without much angst and certainly not "gay now!" or a thin metaphor for gays? Really its not that hard to figure out.

Marvel was/is a strange comic book company. The really popular heroes had relatively little angst: Thor, Iron Man, Ghost Rider, Cap. Sure Spider-Man would angst about, so would the X-Men of whom there a zillion. But the whole point of a character like Thor is he's Angst Free. He's not modern. He's a Shakespearean royal god. Iron Man is a guy who can conquer everything but his drinking problem and a few recurring enemies. Heck look at the Punisher. He's a walking dead man. A living zombie. He doesn't feel. That's the point, his existence is a rebuke to the godlike superheroes who couldn't save his family. Heck even the Fantastic Four were more about a weird super-family than Angst. Angst really is for girls, who eat that stuff up, and gays. But I repeat myself.

And no, comic book movies are not always for fourteen year olds. The latest Cap movie touches on surveillance, war on the cheap through drones, infiltration of organizations by a corrupt elite, all things ordinary movies cannot say but people understand very well.

Follow up on the Cap movie -- the Hydra villains (they are back) justify their actions and indeed view themselves not as villains but heroes as:

Humanity is complicated and warlike.Only total control by a master elite of super-intelligent people who are willing to do what it takes can save humanity.Therefore war and strife must be encouraged to allow that control.

Regardless of the film-makers intentions, it is a stunning critique of the Obama-Bush administration and desire for global elite control, war on the cheap, targeted assassination, and much more.

Yes it has kid-friendly super-heroics and awesomeness. Cap does not give a big speech at the end but kicks ass because ... He's Captain America! But the movie really says something I've not seen in Hollywood for ages. The attitudes towards government, even "good guys" is completely different.

Does anyone remember the old 80s Larry Hama GI Joe comics? Those were honestly the most "adult" comics ever, and the best written of all despite being toy based. He also took over wolverine and saved it from cancelation and made it a huge success and came up with most of the material people associate with him in the movies now.

Both were huge commercial successes, yet a lot of the fan boy comic nerds didnt like him bc he wrote for a non superhero book first. A lot of the stuff he did was very far ahead of its time, like doing an entire issue with no words or sound effects yet still conveying a great story for any age. Just now art schools are starting to recognize this and asking him to speak to the students about it 25 years later!

The really popular heroes had relatively little angst: Thor, Iron Man, Ghost Rider, Cap. Sure Spider-Man would angst about, so would the X-Men of whom there a zillion.

The problem with your analysis is that it's not supported by sales. Since the 1980s, angsty X-Men and Spider-Man have been Marvel's best sellers while Captain America, Thor, the Avengers, Fantastic Four, etc. have mostly been also-rans.

http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales.html

Take the most recent month available (April 2014). Even with the box office clout of Marvel's Avengers and assorted heroes over the past several years, other than Hulk at #7 there are -- count them -- five X-Men related titles before you hit The Avengers at #25. There are also three Spider-Man related titles before The Avengers, two of them at the very top.

Disney's Marvel films, and Columbia's Spider-Man movies for the most part, have done better than Fox's X-Men and Fantastic Four movies because Fox has mishandled the properties. It's been lousy and received the approbation of the comic geekdom for it.

Anonymous:"How was Godzilla heavy on the Gaia worship? Because an F35 with a SUPER WEAPON didn't save the day?"

Entire premise of the movie: Man is not in control of nature; nature is always in control. Godzilla is the agent of Nature (with a capital "N"), here to restore the balance, etc. Gaia worship. the SWPL cult in Japanese monster movie guise.

If you're a sperg lookig for wheels within wheels you probably imagined Gaia worship. If anything it was a rebuke to the global warming cult thinking they can "fix" the climate.

Godzilla showed up to squash a bug or two and left the rest of the city alone. He even avoided chopping the Saratoga in half with his dorsal fin. Godzilla was a force of nature, like a hurricane or a tsunami. Can't be mitigated, just endured. Hell, the shot of him leaving SF with the F22s behind him in formation kind of makes the point that this is a message free popcorn flick, but autism.

AMOUR was a jumped-up LIFETIME TV movie. Emotional pornography for 40 year old women.

Really? There were teary speeches? Lots of hand-holding solidarity? Caricatures of familiar tropes (evil businessman/husband/insurance company)? Contrived, therapeutic resolutions of long-standing familial rifts? "Closure"? And the ending, yes I see it now, was actually "inspirational", as understood by the average Oprah viewer (I must have missed the couple's ascension to heaven at the finale--did they put that after the credits or something?).That or there's another Lifetime out there and another definition of "jumped up".I'm not saying the film was perfect, but don't critique something as cliched by...reaching for a cliche. Or at least find the right cliche.

If this is indeed 'possible' and well-deserved, did Rodgers not have a right to pissed by lack of comparable attention?

It seems ideologies really don't matter.

Power is about knowing that most people are brainless sheeple and about gaining the skills/means to manipulate them. That so many American youth think themselves morally and culturally superior because they are into such nonsense makes you distrust the notion of ideology.

The elites no longer believe in it. It's about their power and privilege. It's now all about controllogy. And image trumps ideas. Iconology rules more than ever with everyone hooked to online world 24/7.

literally. what do you think the PG-13 ification of the modern american film industry was about?

selling tickets my man. selling tickets. G, PG, R, those are out. most big budget movies are PG-13 to maximize profits. the days of R action movies is long over.

hear the collective groan of the nerds when it's announced that the die hard remake is, in fact, targeted for PG-13. can't wait for that PG-13 terminator remake. exciting stuff!

big budget, original property R movies are a big financial risk, which most of the players in the industry no longer take. much easier to cruise on profits from PG-13 fare. if you're a writer or director and have an idea for an original R script, you'll have to work a lot harder to sell it to producers. the only exception are comedies where the actors say fuck 20 times, since that is an automatic R. but you can sell a good comedy with lots of swearing, people will buy that.

one of the only good trends: elimination of nudity from mainstream movies. the internet really comes through for you on that. since you can see anything you want anytime you want on the web, there's no need to browbeat actresses into getting topless for 10 seconds to sell some more tickets. no more having the action stars just happen to walk into a strip club, which was a staple of 80s and 90s action flicks. now the movies can just focus on the plot or showing us cool stuff.

"X-Men: First Class sold $146 million worth of tickets, it probably did not even earn back in theatrical its filming cost"

it made 353 million dollars.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=xmenfirstclass.htm

most big action movies make more money outside the US than domestically. this is the film industry's new, main weapon. it's hard to lose money now on certain movies.

i've talked about this before as one of the main reasons corporate profits are accelerating so much. ricardo's ideas do not work in the reality of 2014. when industry leaders go international today, instead of finding foreign competitors, they often simply find more customers. tariffs, of course, mitigate this, to varying degress.

in this particular example, china imposes stiff tariffs on foreign movies. they take 50% of all profits, and limit the number of releases per year. still, even with those rules in place, china is the second best place to release movies. billions of dollars come out of china every year and back to the movie studios pockets.

Does anyone remember the old 80s Larry Hama GI Joe comics? Those were honestly the most "adult" comics ever, and the best written of all despite being toy based.

Yeah, they were pretty good, despite the material Hama often had to work with. The antagonists represent a strange, mirror-image of American idealism, the protagonists don't always win, and get jerked around and deceived by their superiors (one story ends with one character deliberately sabotaging a CIA operation as revenge for being lied to by the agent running it) and the protagonists' Russian counterparts are also decent, well-intentioned people likewise being manipulated and sacrificed by their own superiors.

Sometime in middle school there was a student who was at least 2 years older, a foot taller, and 100 pounds heavier than his grademates. How did the rulers of that school protect other students from him? By making him the class president, football team quarterback, scout troop leader, grand pooh-bah, etc.

Not something that one would want to adopt as policy in dealing with members of a self-proclaimed separate race with super-powers, I think.

For all its flaws, I think Ratner's X-Men film may have been the only one in the series that actually portrayed fears of these absurdly powerful (and often rather unstable at best) individuals as being reasonable, as well as acknowledging that not *everyone* might want to possess mutations setting them apart from humanity.

"literally. what do you think the PG-13 ification of the modern american film industry was about?"

Ratings make little sense, but I think the rating board is most sensitive about the 'possible' than the 'impossible'.

If you think about it, TWILIGHT and lots of action movies(that are rated PG-13) are pretty disturbing. A young woman wants to be bitten and become a vampire. Or some action hero fights enemies and as a result, half the city goes kablooey.

Pretty dark or violent stuff. But rating board doesn't take it seriously since no one's gonna turn into vampires and no city is gonna blow up cuz of some tin-can man and evildoer got into a tussle.

But lo and behold, KINGS OF SUMMER gotta be rated R even though what happens in mild stuff compared to TWILIGHT and action movies. Why? Cuz images of kids drinking beer, smoking cigars, and making racially insensitive remarks are within the realm of the real and possible.

But really, R-rating for KINGS OF SUMMER is the most ridiculous I've seen in a long time.

I'd rather have kids watch that than TRANSFORMERS where entire cities are knocked out.

It's been compared to STAND BY ME and LUCAS, but those 80s films were formulaic, contrived, mushy, preachy, and clumsy. Heavy and message-laden. As for John Hughes movies, less said the better.

KINGS OF SUMMER is real poetry and visual music. I've never seen such glorious use of sunlight and the greens of summer. And such fine acting. And how nice to see kids than mere types. So, the blonde girl is an actual character than just another harebrained bimbo or nasty bitch(as in Mean Girls). Each of the guys is eccentric in his own way. And parents weren't reduced to cartoon heavies or mere sidekicks as in those dreadful Hughes movies of the 80s.

There's funny stuff without being reduced to mere joke material. The hindu guy delivering chinese food is a riot but in the realm of the real.

Dennis Dale:"Really? There were teary speeches? Lots of hand-holding solidarity? Caricatures of familiar tropes (evil businessman/husband/insurance company)? Contrived, therapeutic resolutions of long-standing familial rifts? "Closure"? And the ending, yes I see it now, was actually "inspirational", as understood by the average Oprah viewer (I must have missed the couple's ascension to heaven at the finale--did they put that after the credits or something?).That or there's another Lifetime out there and another definition of "jumped up".I'm not saying the film was perfect, but don't critique something as cliched by...reaching for a cliche. Or at least find the right cliche."

The film was an orgy of sentiment; there was nothing clean and hard in its vision. It was made for the female brain. It was a LIFETIME TV movie in art-house drag.

Anonymous:"Godzilla showed up to squash a bug or two and left the rest of the city alone. He even avoided chopping the Saratoga in half with his dorsal fin. Godzilla was a force of nature, like a hurricane or a tsunami. Can't be mitigated, just endured."

Precisely. The film is a hymn to the supremacy of Nature over man. Where Man's feeble tools and weapons fail, Godzilla triumphs. Gaia's Vengeance.

I thought they were outstanding. The generals and politicians would back stab them, the terrorists would win most of the time, and amazing characters like the head terrorist being a sociopathic former used car salesman/amway salesman who gradually fooled a lot of people into believing his nonsense. I also remember one of the characters talking about how knives were banned in Okinawa by the ruling Japanese, only to lead to the most form of unarmed combat to be created at the time - and the rhetorical question asking when politicians will ever learn that legislating objects was pointless.

I tried to get into other marvel comics from the 80s and 90s, and none of them came close to being as good as GI Joe. Pretty sure Hollywood ripped off a lot of hama's stuff over the years, too. I always thought Alan Rickman would have been the perfect cobra commander, too.

Or maybe some sort of Shinto avenger. Maybe a universal s*&t happens force. Maybe an ancient warrior interstellar space monster? Godzilla has never been hung up on silly consistency. That was a bit of the fun of it.

I thought they were outstanding. The generals and politicians would back stab them, the terrorists would win most of the time, and amazing characters like the head terrorist being a sociopathic former used car salesman/amway salesman who gradually fooled a lot of people into believing his nonsense. I also remember one of the characters talking about how knives were banned in Okinawa by the ruling Japanese, only to lead to the most form of unarmed combat to be created at the time - and the rhetorical question asking when politicians will ever learn that legislating objects was pointless.

Or the one where the protags help an exiled African prince return to his country, whereupon he promptly expels both the Russian and American ambassadors (much to the protagonists' amusement) and declares that preserving his nation's cultural heritage is a more important issue than whether its government will be democratic or socialist.

Another good one has two evenly-matched ace jet pilots expending all of their ordinance trying to shoot each other down, before heading back to base in silence after a mutual, flyby aerial salute, while their bewildered female backseaters demand to know what just happened, exactly.

WaPo has an article about some guy using the GSS to study levels of trust among Americans, which he found to have steadily eroded since 1972--he mentions Robert Putnam speculating about television and technology, but omits mention of his shelved-for-years study about distrust correlating with diversity:

No, they didn't. Citizen Kane was not aimed at a 14 year old, not even a smart one. Neither was any one of hundreds of other movies up through the 1980s or so. Intelligent movies have gotten quite a bit rarer since then. Care to give some examples, or would you prefer to just continue with baseless assertions?

This is total BS. The bakery doesn’t ban homo customers. It refuses to bake a certain kind of cakes.It’s like a publisher doesn’t have to print everything that is offered.A newspaper doesn’t have to accept every kind of advertising simply because the ad submission happens to be legal. A newspaper can decide what kind of ads to accept and reject(even if it’s legal), Dildos are legal, but NY Times can reject dildo ads on its pages. Is that discrimination against sex toy industry?If the bakery has a sign that says ‘no homos allowed’, that would be a problem. But the bakery simply refuses to celebrate ‘gay marriage’ which is an abomination and affront to true marriage.It’s like a black baker has a right to refuse to bake a cake with a Confederate flag even though the flag is legal.And an atheist baker has a right to not bake a cake with Crucifix if he finds it offensive.Now, if an atheist baker put up a sign that says ‘no religious customers allowed’, that would be a problem. But he has the right to reject certain specific orders.After all, the Nazi party is legal in the US. Does that mean a Jewish baker must bake a swastika cake if such is ordered? If bakers must bake ‘gay marriage’ cakes, then Jewish bakers should be forced to bake Swastika cakes.

Let us know if you come across any movies made for people with mental ages greater than fourteen.

I remember watching Battle Los Angles on TV (I certainly wouldn't have paid to see it). I couldn't see it through to the end (or even the middle) Never mind a mental age of 14, I fear it was aimed at an IQ of 14.

Oh yeah! I forgot how the CIA field guy was portrayed as a giant liar and weasel, and almost all the foreign leaders they helped would turn their backs on them in a minute. It was incredible for a boy to find out how the real world worked. I also remember how stunning the details would be on firearms and vehicles and tactics bc Hama owned a small library of military books.

He is on Facebook these days, and has a fan page where he posts sketches that are awesome! Did you ever "read" the silent issue?

I'd never heard about Hama (reading comic books is not really my thing) but the guy is interesting. Japanese descent, fought in Viet Nam from 1969-1971. I can imagine that being Asian, fighting against people who are a lot closer to you ethnically, you'd have a very different perspective on the subject than a Euro-American. It would be an interesting perspective.

Learn from a superior evolutionary strategy. There will always be some non-white immigrants who will work and learn and improve themselves.

If you shut them out entirely, they will just force their way in (think Ottomans, Mongols, etc).

Let them in the EU, but they must first acknowledge they are in a Eurostate for the European people. Period. They are there to work and learn, as guests and never masters. Just like in Israel, any non-Jewish citizen must acknowledge they are in a specifically Jewish state. If they don't like it, go to Brazil or South Africa.

And if they come in, they will work. If you are stuck for ideas, read the Torah laws for how to deal with outsiders. Still stuck, check the Talmud.

Learn from the most moral and ethical evolutionary strategists in the world - a race that has kept itself basically pure in non-white areas for millennia.

He is on Facebook these days, and has a fan page where he posts sketches that are awesome! Did you ever "read" the silent issue?

I have the entire, original 1982-1994 run.

I'd never heard about Hama (reading comic books is not really my thing) but the guy is interesting. Japanese descent, fought in Viet Nam from 1969-1971. I can imagine that being Asian, fighting against people who are a lot closer to you ethnically, you'd have a very different perspective on the subject than a Euro-American. It would be an interesting perspective.

His family was also interned during WWII and basically lost everything, according to an interview he did for a fan back in 1998m though he seems to carry much resentment over it.

Hama is definitely an interesting character with an interesting perspective; a bit of a liberal, racially, but with no time for racial grievance-mongering. Apparently, the Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow characters (a white, American-born ninja and his Japanese friend/rival, respectively) are based on Hama's conception of himself in terms of his American upbringing and Japanese heritage. Other characters were based on his army buddies from Vietnam (some of whom have their names on the war monument).

Enough with hating anything Jewish. Magneto is the best character in the story by far. If I were in his shoes, I'd be a Simon Wiesenthal too - maybe much less nice.

The problem isn't that Some Jews hunt and punish their enemies. The problem is that so many of them go along with literally any situation and never fight. They are supremely adaptive, but in an entirely passive way. They prefer to spy, copy, subvert, but hate open fights.

That's why the Holocaust was such a monstrous event. The Germans thought they were fighting a "war against the Jews" and expected the Jews would get out or fight back (like Germans would). Instead they laid down, hid, refused to leave, tried to adapt.

Some even joined the NS, like Heydrich the blond beast and poster boy. Not proved, I know. But obvious.

So the question is, which Europeans (non Jews, I mean) and which Jews will work together to help each other when push comes to shove? You can't beat the Jews, but the Jews also cannot really beat you without destroying the physical protection non-Jewish white societies give them. We can fight openly and play by open rules, and they need us for that reason.

Without the white goy, they are defenseless against the world. Best to join together.

Mr Anon:"No, they didn't. Citizen Kane was not aimed at a 14 year old, not even a smart one. Neither was any one of hundreds of other movies up through the 1980s or so. Intelligent movies have gotten quite a bit rarer since then. Care to give some examples, or would you prefer to just continue with baseless assertions?"

I watched CITIZEN KANE when I was 13 and understood it; I watched SEVENTH SEAL when I was 14 and understood it; I watched THE GODFATHER ONE and TWO when I was 14 and understood it; I watched BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI when I was 12 and understood it, etc.

In contrast, when I tried to read to read KING LEAR at 13, I failed; the deeper meanings eluded me. The same thing occurred when I was 14 and tried to read THE SOUND AND THE FURY.

Great literature is for adults; "great" films are for smart 14 year olds.

Love how the White woman author of the piece (Gavia Baker-Whitelaw) basically uses a lack of POCs as a blind to cover her real agenda. And that real agenda boils down to "There are not enough White women in this movie for me to identify with."

"I watched CITIZEN KANE when I was 13 and understood it; I watched SEVENTH SEAL when I was 14 and understood it; I watched THE GODFATHER ONE and TWO when I was 14 and understood it; I watched BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI when I was 12 and understood it, etc."

But did you understand them fully? Great works offer something new every time one revisits them.

For example, one thing that's been overlooked in relation to Rosebud is Kane's son. We don't see much of him--I think in just one scene. And we hear that his mother and he got killed in some accident. So, we disregard him altogether.

When we think of rosebud(sled), we think of Kane's remembrance of his own childhood. But maybe it had something to do with his son too who died young. Maybe Kane felt guilt as a father who left his family for a floozy Susan Alexander.

Susan gives him no children, so Kane dies 'alone'. He has servants and all but no blood relations. He has tons of stuff, but once he dies, they are merely junk.

It's something that people today need to think about. So many people are singles living for today. They are like little Kanes. They collect books, music, clothes, and etc, etc, etc. All such stuff supposedly lends meaning to their lives--like with the record collecting guy in High Fidelity. But once people grow old and die, what is all that stuff? Just garbage, like so much stuff in Kane's archives. If Kane had a son, he might have given rosebud sled to him as a keepsake. But without a son and all alone, the sled just goes into the furnace.

Interesting that HER and INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS came out the same year. Both are similar.

Men who don't grow up. Men who are adrift on foot or emotionally.

INSIDE isn't a masterpiece like some people say, but it has a special look and I really felt for the cat.

Last night I watched half of HER(and will finish later), and it's clever and all, but what an inane movie about inane people.

The character of INSIDE may not be all with reality but he's in the real world with real people and real cats. In contrast, HER is so icky and insular. Made me feel ewwwwwwww. The 'sex' scene between the dork and 'her' was stomach-churning.

But seriously, I'd say men rule because of higher levels of creativity, rationality, cooperation, physical strength, motor skills, aggression... And no, testosterone doesn't always beat estrogen. And who would want it to? What would we do in a world without women? What do you do?

Men rule? Yes and no.

Speaking of films and our eternal women problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_and_JimThere's a great quote from Baudelaire in there , that encapsulates the film's theme, about how women are "natural therefore abominable"; the superior decency and wisdom of the men has no chance against the natural irrationality of the woman. It's all very Camille Paglia-ish, but true.

It's something Lars von Trier touches on in Antichrist, a positively reactionary film: women are trouble because they "aren't in control of their own bodies"--because of reproduction. All this feminist rage is really in reaction to that. Notice how it all seems to be working toward eliminating the "disparate impact" of Nature.

I have a crack-pot theory that soon enough all reproduction will be in vitro. Natural reproduction will one day be seen as a barbaric, historical curiosity. They won't be able to imagine how people endured it.

Anonymous:"I'd never heard about Hama (reading comic books is not really my thing) but the guy is interesting. Japanese descent, fought in Viet Nam from 1969-1971. I can imagine that being Asian, fighting against people who are a lot closer to you ethnically,"

The Vietnamese are not "ethnically" close to the Japanese; the two cultures are quite distinct. Add to that the fact that Hama is Japanese-American, and one can easily see that he would have had little to nothing in common with the Vietnamese on a cultural level.

The only genuine point of contact would have been a shared East Asian racial background.

"...As of the end of 1944, the Viet Minh claimed a membership of 500,000... Due to their opposition to the Japanese, the Việt Minh received funding from the United States, Soviet Union and the Republic of China."

Well, nambla is allowed to march in the 'gay pride' San Fran parade. Jews protected and promoted homos, and now homos, with great power, might protect and promote pedos, their close allies.

Just like homos called themselves 'gay', maybe pedos will come up with label for themselves that sounds less graphic: 'fey'? 'cuddly'? 'teddy'(as in teddy bears)? Teddy power!

There used to be a time when homos were raised to feel ashamed of being homo. Today, we say that was cruel and wrong. Homo kids should have been encouraged to feel proud of what they are. So, homo shame isn't natural but something forced on wonderful homos who should feel so proud.

Today, if some kid was fondled as a kid, he or she calls it 'molestation'. But maybe pedos will argue that they were loved and fondled(with affection) and NOT molested, i.e. that the idea of molestation is puritanical and 'judgmental', instilling kids with shame over something they should have enjoyed. Pedos will argue that children feel shame about being 'touched' because society deems such things as wrong. But if society is persuaded that it's 'natural' for adults to 'touch' kids, kids won't grow up with shame complex. And Pedos might invoke nature because adult animals sometimes lick and touch young ones in funny parts.

So, let's do the Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow stuff all over again. Today, we are shocked by Farrow's revelations. But if our culture changes and if the prevailing 'value system' says it's okay for parents and adults to fondle their children--and allow children to watch their parents having sex--and even encourages adults(parents and their friends)to do so, then one could argue kids who were 'touched' have no reason to feel any shame. They were not 'molested' but 'shown affection'.Maybe one day, SWPL parents will invite their friends over and show them their kids' willies and tell them to touch them. Maybe such behavior will be praised by media for making kids feel natural and unashamed about 'love'.

Sound crazy? Well, 'gay marriage' sounded crazy in the past. But today, so many smart and educated people think it's perfectly okay for kids to be adopted and raised by two guys who do fecal penetration.

Ask yourself. Why is there so much sexualization of children? Not just young teens but real children? If children are thus sexualized, one could argue that sexuality comes naturally to children. And if children are seen as sexual beings, then touching and other action between adults and children isn't molestation but 'natural' and 'new-normal'.

We are living in sick times, and we know in our hearts that there are many homos and pedos are working together to turn the culture upside down. Is it any wonder that so many homos and pedos are in children's entertainment? I'll bet teletubbies were made by a bunch of homos and pedos.

Reading comics was never my thing, either. Hama written GI Joe was the only thing I ever really liked as a kid. But you are right - the guy is extremely interesting. Comics tended to be full of super liberal stuff, and the line I read about how useless legislating objects was with how Okinawa invented the most dangerous forms of karate after Japan banned knives still resonates with me to this day! Other comic writers at marvel said Hama would freak out the ones who had never touched a gun before by asking them to open up his briefcase that would have a real 1911 or Uzi in it just to see them freak out in horror. Gotta admit, if I worked with a bunch of liberal types, I would find it hilarious to see that done to them.

So many issues were like this - with extreme accuracy in firearms, military history, etc. it was amazing - and even when I go back and read them now it is even more impressive.

I have the entire run as well. Hasbro forced too much nonsense toward the last couple years, but the first 115 issues or so and the special missions series were just absolute gold and as good as comics get. My problem was I got started reading Hama gi joe comics first, and so whenever I tried to get into the others they all just seemed kinda boring and unrealistic to me.

There are apparently a lot of his fans still out there judging by how many people contact him on Facebook. His personal page reached the 5k limit and this public page has 1500 or more fans on it.

Yeah, Hama seems a bit liberal on some things, but nothing like today's racial liberals. He also mentioned at one point he was a NRA member, and I read stories about him scaring his effeminate fellow marvel workers to death by having them open up his briefcase with his 1911 and uzi in it. He also talked one time about people at the gun range giving him hell over firing a Luger, but he felt it was pointless to have an original pistol like that and never shoot it.

And the line about how it was pointless for politicians trying to legislate objects like guns was something I can't really even believe marvel allowed him to interject in the comic to be honest.

Dennis Dale:"And no, testosterone doesn't always beat estrogen. And who would want it to? What would we do in a world without women? What do you do?"

Who said anything about a world without women? Men rule over women.

Dennis Dale:"Men rule? Yes and no."

More like Yes and Yes (cf Goldberg's book).

Dennis Dale:"Speaking of films and our eternal women problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_and_JimThere's a great quote from Baudelaire in there , that encapsulates the film's theme, about how women are "natural therefore abominable"; the superior decency and wisdom of the men has no chance against the natural irrationality of the woman. It's all very Camille Paglia-ish, but true."

Only for degenerates.

Dennis Dale:"It's something Lars von Trier touches on in Antichrist, a positively reactionary film: women are trouble because they "aren't in control of their own bodies"--because of reproduction. All this feminist rage is really in reaction to that. Notice how it all seems to be working toward eliminating the "disparate impact" of Nature."

Film was adequate. Scando horror.

Dennis Dale:"I have a crack-pot theory that soon enough all reproduction will be in vitro. Natural reproduction will one day be seen as a barbaric, historical curiosity. They won't be able to imagine how people endured it."

A notion shared by people as disparate as CS Lewis (cf THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH) and lowbrow SF author SM Stirling.

David:"A good number of "A" movies from the Golden Days of Hollywood were aimed at adults. Just look at "The Best Years of Our Lives" for a sample of the level that was considered popularly accessible."

It was accessible to me when I was 11.

David:"Now compare that film to an OSCAR GOLD! movie made recently: "The King's Speech." Which film is more mature?"

I don't think I knew anything about the X-Men until the movies came out. Maybe saw the title of the comics somewhere.

I find I just can't get into them (even follow them) at all, it's odd. Of course, I'm old enough that I'm still having a bit of a time adjusting to Iron Man's new-fangled red-and-gold suit.

The original Iron Man wore a suit that looked like he was wearing a 55-gallon drum and a wastebasket on his head, all made out of inch-thick brass. I read somewhere it was a cross between early Moon suit designs and Heinlein's concept of armoured infantry in Starship Troopers.

Both comics and science fiction switched, maybe somewhere in the mid 60s, away from the earlier pulp or "hard SF" styles. The old style had often been elementary on the human side of the story but "boys life" on the science and engineering side (lots of diagrams of how spider man or batman's gear worked, for instance).

This was the so-called New Wave. All of a sudden SF was soft and wanted literary respectability. Everything was about the human side, the story line. Comic books seemed to be rowing along.

I'd argue something was lost as well. You could actually learn something about science from hard SF and even from SF-oriented comics (well, maybe if you were 12 years old). But with the advent of New Wave even that was lost and things became more and more pure fantasy.

"The New Wave science fiction of the 1960s emphasized stylistic experimentation and literary merit over scientific accuracy or prediction. It was conceived as a deliberate break from the traditions of pulp SF, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant and unambitious...

... sought to ..."define a new avant-garde role" for science fiction by the use of "new literary techniques and modes of expression."..."

I know. I was agreeing with you. Just saying you still have to go out and earn it; being born with a set of testicles doesn't mean you have balls.* Or brains. As Sgt Hulka would say: lighten up, Francis.

You take it all too seriously young man. But I think I will check out that CS Lewis story--in all seriousness.

You do realize that he was only the chief spiritual leader of Israeli Sephardic and Mizrahi religious Jews. Religious Ashkenazi Jews in Israel wouldn't necessarily take his pronouncements as authoritative. There is no pope-like controlling authority in Judaism. Secular Jews everywhere would ignore him completely, assuming non-Israeli secular Jews had even heard of him in the first place.

You could actually learn something about science from hard SF and even from SF-oriented comics (well, maybe if you were 12 years old). But with the advent of New Wave even that was lost and things became more and more pure fantasy.

Comics between 1955-1975 were partly educational, as well. With Wertham and the Comics Code, the publishers really needed to get on the good side of the parents and the Military-Industrial Complex. So including actual science (and math, history, geography, civics, etc.) allowed the writers to both indulge in hard-SF and educate the kids.

Sometime in middle school there was a student who was at least 2 years older, a foot taller, and 100 pounds heavier than his grademates. How did the rulers of that school protect other students from him? By making him the class president, football team quarterback, scout troop leader, grand pooh-bah, etc.

Not something that one would want to adopt as policy in dealing with members of a self-proclaimed separate race with super-powers, I think.

I think the original poster was being ironic, and meant just what you said. Physically powerful children need to be either: given stricter supervision and no undue political power over other children, or be physically isolated from their potential victims.

Interestingly, one of the more prominent mid-20th century anti-comics crusaders, Fredric Wertham, was a German-Jewish psychiatrist.

With Wertham and the Comics Code, the publishers really needed to get on the good side of the parents and the Military-Industrial Complex

That was all part of the "Jewish-American civil war" of the early 1950s. It included McCarthyism, the Rosenberg trials, even comics censorship. And there were unrelated issues ... Max Gaines, founder of EC Comics, had many friends in high places. His son Bill, lost such support when he changed EC's direction from lowbrow Christian conservative to secular libertarian. Wertham was easily bribed into targeting EC Comics rather than (say) Catechetical Guild - a Catholic outfit which should have outraged a left-wing Jew like Wertham.

"You do realize that he was only the chief spiritual leader of Israeli Sephardic and Mizrahi religious Jews. Religious Ashkenazi Jews in Israel wouldn't necessarily take his pronouncements as authoritative. There is no pope-like controlling authority in Judaism. Secular Jews everywhere would ignore him completely, assuming non-Israeli secular Jews had even heard of him in the first place."

My (secular) Israeli ex-girlfriend used to mock the guy, saying he had told everyone they couldn't blow their nose on Saturday. She was also, ironically, the one who told me to lay off the Germans, and tried to get me to buy a German refrigerator.

Anyone still reading this thread will appreciate this: she actually did play the dual loyalty card and tried to get me to vote for McCain because it would be better for Israel; I declined, figuring he was a hothead who would get us into WW3.

"That was all part of the "Jewish-American civil war" of the early 1950s. It included McCarthyism, the Rosenberg trials, even comics censorship. And there were unrelated issues ... Max Gaines, founder of EC Comics, had many friends in high places. His son Bill, lost such support when he changed EC's direction from lowbrow Christian conservative to secular libertarian. Wertham was easily bribed into targeting EC Comics rather than (say) Catechetical Guild - a Catholic outfit which should have outraged a left-wing Jew like Wertham."

Um....isn't it possible that Wertham actually believed in all this vice stuff (he went after Batman for the homosexual content, after all) and was genuinely upset at the EC comics with the guy holding the dripping head? The guy seems to have been of the old liberal good-government school, now long since buried under diversity and World War T.

"If you shut them out entirely, they will just force their way in (think Ottomans, Mongols, etc)."

I don't think we have a problem with the Ottomans and Mongols. Hordes of sword and spear-wielding horsemen are not the issue. Internal rot, rule by bankers and the destruction of a healthy nationalism are the issues. Although I still fail to see how letting in a few hardworking Huns and Mongols would have prevented Ghengis Khan or Alexander the Great from conquering and slaughtering everything in their path. Only instantaneous, complete, abject and prostrate surrender would suffice, if that.

Um....isn't it possible that Wertham actually believed in all this vice stuff (he went after Batman for the homosexual content, after all) and was genuinely upset at the EC comics with the guy holding the dripping head? The guy seems to have been of the old liberal good-government school, now long since buried under diversity and World War T.

Wertham was a true believer in all his stuff. He was most definitely from the moralistic Moscow School rather than the nihilist Frankfurt School. My point stands, that he was definitely selective in his targeting. It is very possible that TPTP either bribed or blackmailed him (over his commie past) into going after Gaines/EC first and foremost. Wertham never said a bloody thing about the Catechetical Guild and its Catholic falangism, violent art and stories*, paranoid conspiracy mongering, and hidden anti-Semitism.

* Although its depictions of communist atrocities in Eastern Europe were factual.

Mr Anon:"Sure, it was about a sled. I'm sure you picked right up on that."

The Sled. Bernstein's speech about the girl. The shots from below, making the characters look like titans, etc. The only thing that I didn't really appreciate at the time was the deep-focus photography.

Mr Anon:"Yeah, it was about a bridge. You were a real prodigy."

Sadly, no. BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI is just a very obvious film.Hence, it didn't take much brains to see what Lean was going for. Try comparing it to Donne. The chasm between great literature and film is very wide and deep.A boy can get KWAI; he can't get Donne.

I would recommend Grant Morrison's run on the title. Some quite striking ideas. What really makes it stand out is GM's take on Magneto; he shows the Hitlerian politics behind the persecuted minority facade. Needless to say, the fanboys loathed what he did.

"The Vietnamese are not "ethnically" close to the Japanese; the two cultures are quite distinct. Add to that the fact that Hama is Japanese-American, and one can easily see that he would have had little to nothing in common with the Vietnamese on a cultural level."

So I messed up ethnic and racial. Imagine someone like Hama going over to fight against people his fellow soldiers would be calling "gooks" and "slants", probably in his presence. You don't think he's going to have some pangs of "WTF am I doing here?" That was my point.

Also consider that the Empire of Vietnam was one of the member states of the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which had an idealistic origin even if it was used by the Japanese military as justification for a power grab.

"Most of the American soldiers in the Korean/Vietnam wars were more interested in fighting "gooks and slants" rather than fighting communism."

This is usually the case with soldiers. They are told that they're fighting for liberty, democracy, human rights, freedom, and etc, etc, etc. but when you see your fellow soldiers getting shot and blown up, it's not about ideology. It's about them whatevers.

"BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI is just a very obvious film.Hence, it didn't take much brains to see what Lean was going for."

It seems to have an obvious anti-war message, but it's a rather strange film, and in the end, I'm not sure who was in the right. Of course, one cay say that it presents a very kind of obvious textbook version of 'ambiguity' for middlebrow audiences who want to feel a bit sophisticated, but I still think the character of Alec Guinness is fascinating. He's appalling for his admirable qualities. He has a certain logic and he follows it to its end, which is both logical and absurd. Rather reminds me of Strelnikov in Doctor Zhivago. A man of pure revolutionary logic who becomes blind to his inhumanity in the name of humanity.

But I personally don't much care for BRIDGE. Japanese are presented as too comical and inept when they were far crueler with POWs and natives. It seems more like a Boy Scout outing than a prison camp.

I think the original poster was being ironic, and meant just what you said. Physically powerful children need to be either: given stricter supervision and no undue political power over other children, or be physically isolated from their potential victims.

It seems to me that Spider-Man, and the various superheroes who teamed up for the Avengers movie, are better suited to blockbuster films, whereas the X-Men are better suited for serials (which today means TV).

This is because the X-Men is inherently not about particular individuals, but about a group and its relationships. This makes it far better suited to a long-term format where multiple interacting stories play out.

You can tell a story that revolves mainly around one person and their relationships in a movie. To tell a story with multiple foci requires several hours, and time to digest the varying parts.

The Avengers, of course, it also a movie about a team, but there is one major difference: the individuals who make up the team are established heroes in their own right. It's like the Justice League; it is interesting to see how Superman and Batman interact, but their characters are not defined by one another.

With the X-Men, though, each character is first established by their place in the team.

So the dynamics are more complex, and more suited to a format such as TV than to the movies.

""If you shut them out entirely, they will just force their way in (think Ottomans, Mongols, etc)."

But neither of these ever even made it to Western Europe. Eastern Europe, yes. Central Europe a bit. Defense in depth has its place.

The Ottomans got stopped at the gates of Vienna and at Lepanto. The Mongols don't seem to have been so hot in places where they couldn't mass cavalry, like in heavily forested areas that didn't have large rivers that froze over. In any case, they couldn't even sustain the campaign in Central Europe in the face of their own internal politics. Could they have won if they stayed? Maybe, but they didn't even manage to ever come back.

The Mongols are coming, let's surrender now, is hardly a winning or necessary strategy for the modern West.

Gay cannot breed, so they have to recruit. I expect in the near future there will be a move to lower the age of consent. The United States is being filled up by immigrants, but legal and illegal. They have lower AOC. In our country, we do whatever Immigrants want.

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